Baking in Uganda

This past week, I had the fun opportunity to teach some people in Kaberamaido (a neighboring district to Soroti) how to bake cakes using the method of steaming them and with homemade measuring cups.  World Renew works with the development organization in Kaberamaido and they arranged a time for me to come train their staff and then to go to a community where they work and do a training in that place as well.  It was a great time.  Two members of a different community, Julius and Samuel, came to the training too.  They are part of a community group that has an oven and are experts on making mandazi.  They received this training from me so they can go and share the cake baking method with others.

Baking is fun, but it is also an income generating activity that people can do to help them earn money.  The people at the development organization calculated the cost for making one of the cakes I taught them.  They said the ingredients plus charcoal probably would cost, at the most, 5,000 shillings ($2) and if you bought such a cake in the store, it would be about 30,000 shillings ($12)!  So they were pretty optimistic that learning to bake cakes could really help some people out.

Here they are using a homemade measuring cup (made from a ubiquitous plastic cup) to measure out milk for a cassava flour cake.

Everyone got really into the cake baking.  They wanted to keep making new recipes, even after we had completed the ones that we had planned to make that day.

I think we baked for six hours and they were still going when I left to go back to Soroti!

One of the cakes they made (I didn't do any of the work - I just told them what to do and they went through the whole baking process themselves):

Everyone enjoyed the taste-testing.

After I taught the technique for baking cakes, Julius and Samuel taught me how to make mandazi.  It is a much more complicated process than I thought it was, with about 13 ingredients!  You have to mix together the dough, knead it, beat it with a rolling pin, roll it out and cut it into pieces, and let it rise before frying it.

Here's Samuel deep frying the mandazi.

The final product:

The next day, Julius, Samuel, and I trained people from a community where the Kaberamaido development organization works.  The venue was a church in Apapai.  When I arrived, I was surprised to find that Charles, one of the students from the Pentecostal college while I was there, is the pastor of this church!  It was a lot of fun to see him again.

We had a group of at least 100 people who came to learn how to bake.  The training would go on for two days, but I was only able to stay for the first one.

After I taught the theory of how to make your own measuring cup, how to bake a cake by the steaming method, and gave a couple of recipes, Julius and Samuel proceeded to teach the theory of how to make mandazi.

Mixing together the ingredients:

A half-kilogram cup converted into a measuring cup:

Making cakes is so simple.  It made me happy to teach it to one group and then to let Charles answer questions himself for the second group.  They didn't need me anymore after I taught the first group of people!

Preparing to steam the cake over a charcoal stove:

This is how you serve a cake to 100 people here in Uganda:

Here's one photo of the participants working on learning how to make mandazi.  It is not a very peaceful process - you beat the dough with a rolling pin for quite some time after you have already kneaded it!